They lost sixteen more ships to the second salvo—but that left sixteen to launch on Chameleon, hurling over sixty missiles at the crippled Q-ship.
None of those sixteen survived the last salvo. With no Terran starfighters left around them, the only question was whether Churchill’s Katanas could save Chameleon.
#
Kyle watched the missiles boring in on his starship and felt helpless. The plan had come together about as well as could be expected, and his people had performed above and beyond anything he could have reasonably asked of them.
And now there was a good chance none of them would get to go home.
“Vector Q-probe Three to cut it through that swarm,” he ordered aloud, his voice projecting the same confidence he always had, a confidence that was still fragile after Huī Xing. “If we can time it right, we can feed Churchill’s people live data. Even a quarter-second less delay may make a difference.”
“On it,” Taylor confirmed.
He focused on his link to CIC and Chownyk. “Do we have any ECM?”
“Every surface emitter is gone,” his XO admitted. “The repair drones can fabricate much of it in place and we have spares for what they can’t, but we haven’t had time. I’ve got nothing, sir.”
“Alpha Squadron is launching missiles,” Taylor announced. “I’m linking Churchill’s gunners to Q-probe Three. That should give us a decent intercept chance.”
That…was clever. Using Q-probes to feed telemetry for capital ship missiles was an old-game, both on the offensive and the defensive. Fighter missiles were fired at ranges where it wouldn’t be relevant…except in the case of the counter-missile role, where fractions of a second were everything.
Making a mental note to be very sure Taylor got credit for that in his report on this mess, Kyle almost held his breath as the two missile salvos intersected… and vanished in a cascading ball of fire.
“Twenty-eight kills,” Taylor breathed a moment later. “That’s almost a seventy-five percent intercept rate!” She paused. “Q-probe Three won’t be close enough to provide the same value for the next salvo,” she warned.
“Every little bit helps,” Kyle told her gently, keeping the pleased awe out of his voice. The second salvo from Churchill’s ships had a more ordinary thirty percent intercept ratio, wiping a “mere” twelve missiles out of space.
But that meant that instead of facing sixty-four missiles intent on murdering everyone, Churchill’s Katanas had to defend against twenty-four missiles. Missiles that weren’t aimed at them and that had to show their vulnerable aspects as they flashed through the starfighter formation.
Taylor’s handful of remaining lasers nailed the single pair of survivors ten thousand kilometers clear of Chameleon’s hull, and Kyle finally, finally allowed himself to breathe.
“Get everyone back aboard,” he ordered. “Lau, time to Alcubierre?”
“Thirty-two minutes,” the navigator replied.
“Chownyk?”
“Everyone who could intercept us is headed for Shipyard Alpha,” his XO replied. “More concerned about saving a hundred thousand souls from being crushed than catching us.”
Kyle hesitated for a moment.
“They’re going to succeed, right?” he asked softly, his conscience twinging at him.
“If nothing else, they’ve the shipping to evacuate everyone before it hits crush depth for the in-system clippers,” Chownyk replied.
“Good,” Kyle said softly, eyeing the still-spinning immense station on his screen. “Get me Hansen on the link.”
“Captain,” the Marine answered a moment later, exhaustion tingeing his voice.
“Did we get what we were after?”
“We did. It’s already being uploaded to Chameleon and JD-Intel,” the Lieutenant Major confirmed.
“I expected no less,” Kyle told the younger man. “Well done.”
“We paid too much for it,” Hansen said quietly.
“That, too, was expected,” Kyle admitted with a wince. “We’re clear all the way out; get your shuttles aboard.”
#
No one stood down even a fraction for the rest of the flight. Kyle and his crew remained on the bridge, their eyes and neural feeds poring over every scrap of data from the Q-probes, looking for the tiniest hint that someone was moving toward them.
Rokos and his starfighter pilots remained in their ships. With the flight deck half-trashed, they had no easy way to deploy them, and rearming them was impossible, but their lances and remaining handful of missiles were the only real defense the Q-ship had.
“That gunship is tracking our vector,” Taylor warned as they approached the safe zone where they could warp space without ripping the ship apart.
“That’s why we’re not going straight home,” Kyle noted. “Lau?”
“Sixty seconds.”
“Are we clear?” Kyle asked Taylor and Chownyk.
“We’re clear,” the XO reported. “There’s nothing within a million klicks of us. That gunship is going to know where we went, but we wanted that, didn’t we?”
“We did. Taylor, blow the Q-probes.”
Their screens went dark as the three probes orbiting around the starship self-destructed.
“Thirty seconds,” Lau reported.
“Establish Stetson fields,” Kyle ordered.
“Up. Singularities forming. Seem clean.”
Without the sensors, they couldn’t even be sure of that—they’d had to spend what repair time they had rebuilding the Stetson emitters on the hull, not repairing radar emitters and receivers. It was a risk, but none of the mass manipulators were damaged.
They should be okay.
“Warping space.”
Kyle held his breath for a long moment, letting the indescribable sensation of the reality around compressing and twisting to propel the ship forward.
“Bubble formed. Stable.”
The Captain exhaled.
“All right, people,” he said quietly. “Hanz—run out tunnels and get Rokos’s people off their fighters. Everybody else—stand down to skeleton crew. Send everyone we can possibly spare to bed. We’re safe under Alcubierre and we’re not seeing anything except deep space until we’re home.”
#
Chapter 45
Deep Space
16:00 June 22, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
Kyle knocked on the door in the guest quarters of the ship, gesturing for the guard standing outside Glass’s quarters to stand down.
“Take off for a meal,” he told the Marine. “I don’t think we’ll need a guard from here on out.”
“Enter!” Glass’s voice echoed over the intercom. “It’s not like I can say no, is it?”
Kyle stepped through the door and shook his head reprovingly at the spy.
“You’re not actually under arrest, you know,” he pointed out cheerfully. “Restricted to quarters, though I see no reason to keep that up unless you want to be a problem. I’m not going to barge in without permission.”
The elderly spy stood by his wall screen, looking frail in the light of the images and feeds he was studying flickering in and out of existence.
“I figured from the fact you left me Q-Com access,” he noted. He gestured at the wall. “You were right.”
“Just…right out there, huh?” Kyle asked, somewhat surprised.
“Captain Roberts, I have spent ten years, on and off, preparing for this mission,” Glass told him. “I considered every option, every variable, and long ago steeled my heart to commit the massacre I saw as a worst-case scenario.
“Faced with apparent failure, I leapt to that option without thinking. I was prepared for the worst case, so I saw the worst case,” the spy admitted. “You saw…something else.”
“It’s always about angle and force,” the Captain said softly. “Shipyard Alpha was a bit more literal than usual, that’s all.”
Glass made a gesture and a video started playing. A Sai
nt-class battleship approached the Shipyard Alpha station at surprisingly high speed, presumably trying to match the rotational velocity of the spinning platform.
Kyle winced as the jagged end of the station that had been linked to the stabilizer ring hit the battleship, crunching through armor and baffles to wedge itself in the warship’s hull.
“Commodore Kayla Lougheed decided that salvaging Shipyard Alpha was more important than preserving Saint Andrew as a combat-capable unit,” Glass said calmly as the video continued, showing the station’s spin slowing and stopping as the battleship’s engines flared. Vapor exploded out of the ship after a moment, and Kyle winced again as he recognized the source.
“I was not aware,” the spy continued, “that it was possible to overload a Class One mass manipulator.”
“It’s not easy,” Kyle said quietly.
“She burned out three,” Glass concluded. “Replacement value is half the cost of her ship and Saint Andrew is no longer capable of FTL or high-speed maneuvers. But she saved the station, and if the Commonwealth are smart, they’ll give her a medal.”
“What about the rest of the ships at the station?” Kyle asked. Apparently, his resident spy had more data on the mess they’d left behind than he did, though his focus had been on Chameleon. “The slips were not designed for that kind of rotation.”
“Not at all,” Glass agreed. “Vesuvius was six weeks from deployment. She had four missile launcher assemblies in position for install but not attached to anything, simply floating in zero gee. She now has four sixty-meter holes down most of her length.”
“It’ll be cheaper for them to build a new ship,” Kyle said after a moment, considering that level of damage.
“They haven’t even begun their damage surveys yet, but that’s my estimate as well. Two capital ships effectively destroyed. The other eleven under construction damaged to various degrees, extending their build time by periods from months to years.
“Your ‘angle and force’, Captain, did almost as much damage to the Commonwealth’s construction program as my plan to vaporize the station,” the spy said. “With, according to their current estimates, under one percent of the civilian casualties.
“You were right,” he repeated. “I brought in an expert and I should have listened to him.”
“We’d have done better all along if you’d thought that way,” Kyle pointed out.
Glass winced but nodded.
“And I apologize, Captain Roberts. This operation has been my…obsession, for a very long time. What’s Chameleon’s status?”
“We’re en route to New Edmonton right now. We’ll drop out of FTL in four more days and redirect to Castle.” Kyle shrugged. “We’re thirty-two days from home. Once we get there…” He sighed. “Chameleon will never fight again, Mister Glass. I’m not even sure she’ll be safe to fly again. We got hit hard.
“Was it worth it?”
“Yes,” Glass told him. “Hansen’s people got us everything on Project Longbow. Also on the Katanas’ development and half a dozen other fighter-development projects in various stages from rejected to just starting.
“Void, he got us construction schematics, Captain,” the spy concluded, his voice awed. “By the time we make it home, we’ll probably have built our own samples of the Longbow for testing. The odds are our own first-generation bomber is basically just going to be a straight copy.”
“Won’t that make our involvement here obvious?” Kyle asked.
“Trust me to have done my part of this as well as you did your part, Captain,” Glass replied. “By the time we’re done, everyone’s first-generation bomber will be a copy of the Longbow. We’ve already sold the design to the League through a broker who asks no questions…and leaks like a sieve.
“As for the rest…they’ve traced our exit and entrance vectors, and their relief force at Aurelius has now launched a major investigation,” he said. “I believe the Committee on Human Unification and the rest of the Star Chamber will reach the desired conclusions in a week or two.”
“So we just dragged an innocent star nation into a war they didn’t want,” Kyle said sadly.
“Yes,” the spy agreed bluntly. “And in so doing, may have saved our own. The harsh calculus of war allows nothing else. You did well, Captain.”
“Thank you,” Kyle said. “I have one question, though.”
He’d been wondering since the beginning, but he hadn’t wanted to know the answer. It would have tied his hands when he needed them free.
“I owe you answers at this point, I think.”
“How many stars?” Kyle said frankly. “Gods know you’re no civilian, ‘Mister’ Glass.”
Glass laughed and shook his head.
“This op is over, and I’ll be stunned if I ever see the field again,” he allowed. “Plus, I do owe you answers and I trust your discretion.”
He bowed melodramatically.
“Vice Admiral Nicholas Voyager, at your service,” he introduced himself. “Head of the Commonwealth branch of Covert Ops for Castle Federation Joint Department of Intelligence, if you were wondering.
“At this point, Captain, if there is anything Intelligence can do for you, ask. We owe you.”
“I want a command. A real command,” Kyle admitted.
“If it wasn’t for your political enemies, this stunt would have earned you a damned star of your own,” Voyager said calmly. “It’s probably for the best, though. We both know you still need more seasoning for that.”
Kyle breathed a sigh of relief at that. Even he didn’t think he was ready to be an Admiral!
“What about those enemies?”
“The word is already out to the…shadowy sections of the Federation’s economy that if anyone fucks with the Stellar Fox, JD-Intel is going to fuck with them,” Voyager said calmly. “And we don’t need such normally positive things as ‘warrants’ and ‘evidence beyond reasonable doubt’. I can’t control your friend we won’t name, but I can make sure he can’t use cat’s-paws to hunt you or your family.
“Beyond that…we’ll see when we get home,” he finished. “A lot will depend on how the Commonwealth jumps.”
Niagara System—Commonwealth Space
08:00 July 3, 2736 ESMDT
BB-285 Saint Michael—Marshal Walkingstick’s Office
“I’m sorry, James,” Senator Michael Burns said bluntly from his screen. The head of the Committee on Human Unification was a heavyset man with space-dark skin and shockingly white hair. Age hadn’t slowed him down, and more than any other man or woman alive, Michael Burns ran the inevitable expansion of the Commonwealth.
“I managed to mostly talk the Committee out of this stupidity, but it ended up in front of Congress, and the damned Star Chamber voted for a punitive expedition against the New Edmonton System. I figured we may as well bake brick if they hand us clay.
“The expeditionary force has orders to take and hold. New Edmonton is worth the expenditure, and it will make the point the Star Chamber wants about letting the condottieri go pirate in our space.”
Fleet Admiral James Calvin Walkingstick, Marshal of the Rimward Marches and the man charged with conquering the Alliance of Free Stars, sighed.
“We both know damn well that Tau Ceti was almost certainly an Alliance covert op, not condottieri,” he noted calmly. There was no proof, but a League attack simply made no sense. “We also both know that the situation in the League is not normal. Periklos is seriously trying to take permanent control of that mess and pass it to his heirs.
“He can’t stand by and let us chop off systems at our leisure, regardless of apparent provocation.”
“I know,” Burns agreed. “Which is the rest of the bad news I have for you. I’m short-stopping most of your reinforcements and sending them in the direction of the League. We don’t have an official Marshal for spinward, but we will if—when!—Periklos strikes back.
“Admiral Amandine’s expeditionary force isn’t enough to fight the massed condott
ieri even if they weren’t likely to have their own bombers by then. I’m ordering new fleets formed to back him up, but that means your reinforcements are going to be a quarter of what we promised.”
“I need those ships, Senator,” Walkingstick warned. “Katanas and Longbows increase my striking power, but regardless of whether Project Longbow designs were stolen by the Alliance or the League, New Athens Armaments leaks like a sieve. If Periklos starts building bombers, the Alliance will have the designs inside a week.
“I need carriers, cruisers, battleships, Marine divisions—everything I was promised.”
“You told us you could take the Alliance with the resources you had,” Burns reminded him. “I’m afraid you may have to prove that.”
“I can,” the Fleet Admiral said flatly, yanking gently on his long black braid. “But it will take time. Years, not months.”
“You will have it,” the Senator told him. “And more ships as I can scrape them up. We both know how this ends, James. Unification is inevitable.”
“It is,” Walkingstick agreed with a sigh. “Let me know final numbers on what I’ll be getting as soon as you can. We’ll work with it.”
A few more pleasantries and the channel closed. Walkingstick stalked across his office, studying his strategic plot.
He was certain the Tau Ceti Raid had been an Alliance operation—and he knew Burns agreed with him. They’d been too clean, too precise. Too self-sacrificing, not something he would expect of mercenaries like the condottieri.
In one move, they’d cut the force he’d planned to crush their systems with in half. He would adapt. That was what he did.
The answers often lay in what one’s enemies had already done, and his gaze settled on the rimward side of the Alliance, the scattered systems where Castle and Coral still politely struggled for economic and political dominance among systems that hadn’t been worth recruiting for the Alliance.
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